With purely manual transmissions, cable-operated gear shifts are still being developed and produced. In recent years, the trend goes for electronic data transmission between the gear selector lever and the transmission.
First intermediate stages have connected the transmission and the gear selector lever to a cable harness. The cable harness was nothing more than an electrical extension cord to be able to spatially separate functions. The disadvantage was that the number of lines in the cable harness was dependent on the functions and generally the cable harness was becoming heavy, longer and more expensive. The resulting number of additional services was reduced only by the introduction of a bus system in the vehicle (the currently dominant system is CAN). At the same time, the lines were no longer used individually for signals, but for the transmission of messages. This means increased effort at the end points, because messages must be encoded, decoded and the correctness of transmission must be ensured.
Some gearshift systems existing on the market have only an electronic connection to the vehicle. The information is transmitted, for example, by the duty cycle of a PWM signal or by the CAN bus with regular CAN messages. These gearshifts referred to as “shift-by-wire” or in short SbW have a number of advantages over other electric and mechanical interfaces, in particular:
When connecting by the CAN bus, two lines for the bus plus power are enough to exchange all information with the transmission and other control devices (e.g. instrument cluster).
The gear selector lever can be placed anywhere in the working area of the driver.
There can be realized a decoupling from mechanical vibration (NVH) because no holes in the passenger compartment for cables, no bending radii for cables or rigid kinematics need to be observed.
A simple transfer to other platforms/series can be done because adaptation by configuration is possible.
A quick installation in production is ensured because no wiring and adjustments are necessary.
A free choice of the type of actuation is possible because actuation forces and routes or operating locks can be configured as desired.
Additional functions such as force feedback, automatic extension and retraction of the gear selector lever can be easily implemented.
The following disadvantages are known in the prior art:
The transfer of information in a SbW system also requires a corresponding cost of processing, encoding, decoding, and to ensure the integrity of the information as well as the processing components. Typically, this requires:                a complete logic, consisting of        additional hardware, in particular a microcontroller (μC, CPU),        components for communication (transceiver) and more complex components for CAN bus connection,        software for functions, diagnosis        redundancy of the components mentioned for securing        monitoring of the entire development with methods of functional safety (in particular on the basis of ISO 26262),        space for these components which limit particularly the slim gear selector levers        increased energy expenditure and thus also thermal problems in a tight space as well as a higher weight.        
These requirements increase mainly the development costs by more specialists, more tests, more tools, unit cost due to more hardware, longer cycle times and the duration of the development of more features.
From experience and statistical justification, we can also expect that more people involved in the development of a more complex product also overlook more mistakes and thus higher subsequent costs or warranty provisions are necessary.
Against this background, the approach presented here provides an improved control lever, an improved method for operating such a control lever, and a method for evaluating a control lever signal. Advantageous embodiments result from the following description.